Invasion

by Bruce Bond

Wander the fields
just over the border, and look back,
the body you once wore
lost inside the smoke and embers.
Wherever you wake,
you wake alone.
Moths disperse.  The sting-green
glow in the clock
hangs its number
in your iris.
Where news is scarce,
the story of one plurals in the skull,
but mostly
you see darkness.
An estuary drinks a river of blood
whose name fades.
Try to remember.
Turbulence recedes.
A human wreckage
carves the ocean floor.
Stars shiver in a fever,
as they have always done,
but today, they grow virulent, confused.
Tell me, you who huddle
among the coats
and constellations.
Are there hooks
in the faces
of heroes and gods
to hang our faces on,
as those who hang idolatries
in closets, or a nemesis
over the dartboard eye.
My father taught me,
I came out of nowhere,
though I knew better.
I was another man’s child
in another life.
An orphan of myself.
The world I lost,
I lost it everywhere.
I mourned it, needed it
the way sky systems need
the dark to hold them together.

I felt estranged
and brokered a distance
from the shattered voice or vase,
the weeping on the phone.
I needed stillness
to release
a cricket, a lock, a soul, asleep,
whose sobs are only laughter after all.